I took a freshly disillusioned look at that world. It was a world where the leaders of great nations daily pointed to one another as conspirators plotting to exterminate the human race, and where “security” and fear grew rankly intertwined as the ordinary man learned to swallow the idea that _he_ couldn’t be trusted with the truth about anything really important. It was a world where, consequently, the scaremongers, the inside scoopers, and the genuine conspirators throve mightily. And, finally, there was Alice. * * * * * Alice was in the bookkeeping department at Gorley and Gorley. She didn’t have the kind of looks that make cover photographers and movie scouts drool and lunge. But she had something, a spontaneous allure, a magnetism that must surely have upset the IBM machines she worked with. I met Alice, was magnetized, polarized, and lost. Lost and happy. When I proposed to her, and she said _Yes_, I felt that my good fortune was _too_ good to be true. And it was. Some three weeks later she handed back the ring. She couldn’t marry me. It had all been a mistake, and so on. Two days afterward I encountered her by accident in a corridor at the plant. She wore another ring, with a bigger diamond. I stopped her, and roughly demanded: “Who?” Stumblingly, she told me. He was a junior executive, a young-man-who-would-go-far with family connections and stock in the company. Alice was a smart girl, and she’d simply bettered herself. I guess I said some rather bitter things on that subject. “No, Oliver,” she insisted. “It’s not like that at all. It’s just that I don’t love you. I never did.” But she wouldn’t meet my eyes. When I’d cooled down a bit, I realized that she was being honest with me after a fashion. She was lying to me in just the same terms she was lying to herself. And at the same time, recalling little details of her behavior, I realized why. Alice was afraid. Her people had been poor, and she knew what it meant. Anyway, who _wasn’t_ afraid in those days, except for the feeble-minded and some of the insane? So she was looking for security, a place to hide, in that world of the nineteen-fifties where there wasn’t any place to hide. But what was the use of telling her that? I did some serious drinking, enough to convince me that I wasn’t cut out to make a career of it. It was during the sobering-up process that I got the Idea. I wonder how many of the thoughts that changed the world have been fathered by hangovers? I had some days’ vacation with pay coming, so it was comparatively easy. I took a plane, a train, and a ramshackle bus. I then swung in on a grapevine and there I was, walking up the familiar path to the old farmhouse door, where I hadn’t been for a span of years that astonished me when I counted them.